Corvette Racing’s team manager Ben Johnson recently dished some ‘inside baseball’ to Motorsport.com in which he said the team is focusing on maximizing the current Corvette C7.R package while working to reduce errors on the track and in the pits.
The GT Le Mans class in the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship is as competitive as its ever been with Ford, Ferrari, Porsche, BMW and Corvette all vying for the Manufacturers Championship. The Rolex 24 at Daytona showed the just how strong the competition is as all five manufacturers were in the hunt for the win in the final laps of the 24 hour race.
Next month’s 65th Annual Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring is also expected to be as close as ever.
In those last hours of the Rolex 24, the C7.Rs weren’t the fastest cars, but they still were able to leap-frog faster competitors with great execution on its pit stops.
“The technical regulations for the Corvettes remain the same as in 2016,” Johnson said. “But there was still plenty of work to do. It gave us time to catch our breath and work on racecraft.”
“When the rules are changing, you focus on that,” he added. “But when you are running existing rules, your focus turns to preparing the cars to be as good as they can possibly be, and making as few mistakes as you can. You don’t want to lose points because of mistakes, or because of bad choices we made.”
Corvette is the only competitor in GTLM running with both a front-engine/rear-wheel drive and a naturally aspirated V8 engine instead of a turbo-charged engine. But the team appears to have adopted a “run what you brung” strategy and they aren’t dwelling on what they can’t control.
“[2017] is going to be a horse race. But it’s time wasted worrying too much about what the other teams have. We just have to worry about what we have.”
“We definitely had a successful 2016. We had some luck fall our way. But mostly good execution got us where we were.
Source:
Motorsport.com
Related:
[VIDEO] Corvette Racing Recaps the 2017 Rolex 24 at Daytona
Corvette Racing Receives Invitations to the 2017 24 Hours of Le Mans
Corvette Racing at Daytona: Hard-Fought Result for No. 3 Corvette C7.R
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